Posts tagged ‘adoption’

I was just reading an article in CMS that Enterprise 2.0 is about adoption.

Really? That seems obvious. Web 1.0 was about adoption and Web 3.0 and 4.0 will also be about adoption. For any technology to be successful — get people to adopt it and use it and enhance their lives in some way (productivity, increase revenue, connectedness, entertainment, etc…)

I’ve always thought of adoption as follows: convenience, closeness, context, and convergence. Any technology is difficult to implement because of change and you need to get users to adopt the software. So if you’re concerned about end user adoption, think about these 4c’s: context, convenience, closeness, and convergence.

Context. This is about focus, filtering, and providing visibility — i.e. helping users to make sense of the digital mess of information that we manage for projects, clients, process, etc… AND putting it all within a secure context that users can easily understand and find later. You might think “it’s like a portal” — but it’s much more than a basic portal because a collaborative space is not just a means to display information, it provides a context to actually get work done. One of the issues of SharePoint is it can lack context when it comes to team sites or solutions. It does so many things, you really need to leverage the technology in the right context.

Convenience. Thisis about usability and ease of use — again helping to keep things as simple as possible for end users. Fitting the technology into their daily work and personal lives. Making this technology easy means users adopt it. Once they adopt it — it’s hard to change as you just can’t work any other way.

Closeness. This is about end users and understanding what they need, what they want, and how they work. What’s the problem, and how will the technology add value. If you think you can just “build it” and they will come, you are wrong. Some will understand this technology and become power users. As an IT organization, you need to empower those individuals to be change agents and educate them as much as possible. You also need to pick specific projects or “contexts” and be consultative with best practices.

Convergence. A buzz word that is now more popular. This is about converging technologies. It’s not just about the “web channel”, it’s about the user experience channel no matter where or how or what device they get access to your technology solution. And as technology converges within the context of communities – no matter how big or small these communities are — the focus still remains on things like convenience, context, and closeness to foster user adoption.